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Roe
Ethridge
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Curated by
BANKS VIOLETTE
The title
of the exhibition Dear Dead Person refers to a short story by the author
and artist Benjamin Weissman. At a shotgun-rapid three pages, Dear Dead
Person takes the form of a stilted, formal letter to the victim of a car
accident - whose broken body proves to be the highlight of a family's
summer vacation. In a gesture of straight-faced gratitude, the letter
writer isolates the death as a defining vector in the vacation - just
as the death becomes the vector of our own reading enjoyment. The artists
selected for this exhibition all have described, either in part or in
whole, an echo of that same vector, a thank-you letter that answers our
own collective, cultural rubbernecking.
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Jason Fox and Sue de Beer reiterate our dumbstruck involvement with the
news coverage of the school shooting at Columbine or the teenage satanic
violence of Arroyo Grande (in which three teenagers killed a girl to make
their metal band "Hatred" more successful.). And just as Weissman's story
adopts the structure of a letter, the work of both artists adopts equally
recognizable cultural conventions to engage these ideas. By mimicking
the adolescent morbidity of horror movies and album cover art, their work
makes manifest our theatrical fascination with real-life events.
Ivan Witenstein and Jesse Bransford both adopt a dysfunctional, allegorical
framework to respond to the tragedies of the Heaven's Gate mass-suicides
and to the dragging death of James Byrd, Jr. Both events resonate beyond
our ability to understand, tracing a void that both artists fill with
an excess of information - much like the spasm of information that followed
each event.
David Mims and Marlene McCarty both take incidental tragedies, pinpoints
of extinction that escaped the broader lens of media attention. David
Mims presents, with incongruous detail, the story of professional skateboarder
Mark "Gator" Ragowski. Gator's story inverts the usual sequence of the
"jail-house conversion": He first found God and then murdered his ex-girlfriend.
In a display that mirrors this inversion, Mims inverts the universalizing
theory of Op Art through cultural specificity - resulting in a narrative
of inverse redemption. McCarty presents two monumental wall drawings that
illustrate the broken forms of two young girls, Susan Marline Knorr and
Sheila Gay Sanders. Both sisters were tortured and killed by their mother
within a year of one another. Here, their bodies are magnified and sexualized,
complicating our own stake in the insistent need to know every detail
of a tragedy's excess.
Finally, Both Roe Ethridge and Slater Bradley offer the most straightforward
rendering of the exhibition's theme. As a tourist's memento, Bradley took
photographs of a traffic accident in Europe - a disaster converted to
souvenir through the camera lens. As an unplanned echo of Bradley's photograph,
Ethridge presents an ambulance itself as the source of an accident - the
vehicle that comes to our salvation in the event of physical trauma, here
becomes the vehicle for tragedy itself.
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